The Town Hall, Museum And Attached Walls And Railings

The Town Hall, Museum, and attached walls and railings is a market hall dating from the 17th century, extended and remodelled in 1839. Originally a local rubble structure with granite dressings, the building features close-spaced ground-floor openings with a 17th-century arcade of basket arches. It has a granite ashlar clock tower with moulded cornices, pediments on the second stage, and a square, domed lead roof topped with a weather vane over the octagonal clock stage. The east end is slightly bowed and stuccoed, with pilasters, moulded architraves, a moulded first-floor sill string, and a moulded entablature to the parapet. The steep dry slate roof is semi-conical at the east end.

The building has a long rectangular plan, extended at both ends in the 19th century. The Town Hall section is two storeys high with basements on the Lower Market Street side, and features a seven-window range to the first floor over an arcade of twelve basket arches. 20th-century sash windows with glazing bars occupy the first-floor openings, which were enlarged in the 18th or 19th century. 20th-century casements with vertical glazing bars are in the ground-floor openings. The clock tower’s entrance front has a central distyle Tuscan porch, a four-panel door with a patterned overlight, and blind windows over the narrow, two-storey flanking bays. A deeply hollow-chamfered round-arched window with glazing bars and fanlight head is on the second stage, with a datestone above. The original pegged roof structure is visible above the ceiling.

Internally, the Town Hall has an early to mid-18th-century plaster barrel-vaulted ceiling with a dentilled cornice, dado panelling, and a matching rostrum with two flights of turned balustered staircases and ramped handrails. A studded door and latticed and boarded screen indicates the former location of a cell; others were removed around 1978. A mid-19th-century staircase with turned newel posts is located at the east end. The museum, housed in the ground floor of the original building, has chamfered oak or elm crossbeams supporting thick floorboards. The Council Chamber at the east end has a tented ceiling. Most openings are accessed via panelled doors. The building's structure suggests it functioned as a working market house, adapted into a Town Hall in the 18th century.

The site of the Town Hall occupies the location of the pre-Reformation Church of St Mary, and is a well-preserved example of its type for Cornwall. Attached granite coped retaining walls with granite steps lead down from the level of Higher Market Street to Lower Market Street, along with wrought-iron railings.